Space Exploration: Venus Probed

If a super-powerful telescope had been trained on the morning star
last week, it might have seen a tiny, spidery object all vanes and antennae,
creep slowly past the blazing crescent of Venus. This was the U.S.
space-probe Mariner II. For more than four months it had drifted away
from the earth, coasting down a long ellipse toward the orbit of Venus.
Its radio voice grew faint as the miles multiplied into millions, then into
tens of millions. But it was never too faint heard by anxious scientists at
Goldstone station in the Mojave Desert....